The times, they are a-changin'

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 6, 1998 | by Suzanne Fields

When I was growing up in Washington, the nation's capital was a small southern town, famously described by John F. Kennedy, arrived fresh from Hyannisport, Mass., as "a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm."

We were inefficient, but the small-town charm extended to neighbors looking out for each other and a lot of us didn't have to lock front or back doors. The neighborhood drug store was a mom-and-pop operation and the pharmacist, naturally, was "Doc." A teenage boy worked behind the soda fountain, where Cherry Coke was a big seller.

The times, as Bob Dylan reminded us, they were a-changin'. The times sure have changed the nation's capital, and some of these changes have set my mind to counting them. Maybe it's because it's the season of Father's Day, and as I grow older I miss my father, gone for a decade now, more than ever.

We lived next to an alley and my mother and a neighbor walked their dogs, a black cocker spaniel and a collie:, every night at 11 o'clock, always taking the shortcut home through the alley. Crime was not anything anybody worried about.

John Greenleaf Whittier Elementary School, three blocks from my home, was the center of my universe. Mom walked there with me for the first four years, and when I came home for lunch every day we sat together at the kitchen table, munching on kosher bologna on white bread with French's bright-yellow mustard, talking about my morning at school. We listened to the radio adventures of "Helen Trent," who was introduced with the question, "Can a single woman over 35 find happiness?" We tuned in to find out. Feminism was not yet a gleam in a little girl's eye, and Miss Trent pursued happiness along a particularly rocky road.

We were the first family on Quackenbos Street -- among the first 10 families in all of Washington -- to get a television set. The screen was eight inches across, covered with a cumbersome magnifying glass. Every Tuesday night we lined up folding chairs in our living room and neighbors came in to watch Milton Berle perform his vaudeville shtick on Texaco Star Theater. Uncle Miltie pretended to have weak ankles and he dragged his feet across the floor, like the village idiot, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. The shtick had been a hit on vaudeville and it was a hit on Quackenbos, too.

During the week, when neighbors passed each other on Quackenbos we yelled Uncle Miltie's cues at each other, stuck out our tongues, folded our ankles under our feet and laughed heartily at our communal joke. That was as violent as things got on television.

My father was a sports fan and he took the whole family out to the ball game at Griffith Stadium on Georgia Avenue -- Howard University Hospital stands today where Mickey Mantle hit the most monstrous home run in American League history -- and we were always there when the president, whoever he was, threw out the first pitch on opening day.

We were back at Griffith Stadium on wintry Sundays, watching Sammy Baugh sling touchdown passes for the Washington Redskins. My father seemed to know everybody connected with the game. When my mother remarked one Sunday that she wished she could win a Redskins blanket raffled off at halftime, a man arrived at our box late in the second quarter and handed her a ticket and told her to hang on to it. Sure enough, when the winning number was announced, Mom held it.

I told this story the other day to John Kent Cooke, the president of the Redskins, and remarked that Mom, now 87, still fondly remembers that blanket, now long gone. A few days later a man arrived at her house with a new blanket, a gift not from the club -- the halftime raffles are scrupulously honest now -- but from Mr. Cooke himself.

Washington was a segregated town through the 1950s, and the only black people we ever met were maids and workmen. We went to different schools, movie houses and restaurants. During the 1960 civil-rights protests I met many blacks who were native Washingtonians, middle class like me, but otherwise we could never have known each other. It was only then that I understood how whites as well as blacks had been cheated during the long years of enforced segregation.

In 1963 we went down to The Mall to hear Martin Luther King Jr. give his celebrated "I have a dream" speech, and sat with our feet in the Reflecting Pool, black and white together. A few days later I picked myself out of the photograph Life magazine put on its cover. The times were a-changin', and they still are. Sometimes for the better.